A new report in the Financial Times just revealed how deep a mysterious Russian banker’s ties to Putin run after he was caught in a secret meeting with a Trump advisor in the remote Seychelles Islands before last year’s inauguration.

Now, details of Dmitriev’s close links to Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin show that the relationship isn’t just business, but personal. In fact, Kirill Dimitriev got the job as CEO of Russia Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) because his wife befriended Putin’s daughter, with whom they remain close to this day. Very close, according to theTimes:

According to six people close to Mr Dmitriev, his wife is close friends with Mr Putin’s younger daughter. Mr Dmitriev’s wife Natalia Popova was in the same year at Moscow State University as Yekaterina Tikhonova, Mr Putin’s younger daughter, and is the deputy director of her technology foundation, Innopraktika.

Ms Popova’s close friendship with Ms Tikhonova helped secure Mr Dmitriev’s job running the Kremlin’s $10bn Russia Direct investment Fund and has made him a powerful figure in the Kremlin, according to three people who work with Mr Dmitriev, a state banker, a fellow private equity executive and a person who knows him socially.

In fact, Dmitriev is so close to Putin that he is still on the board of his daughter’s firm Innopraktica today. More importantly, he’s a minor oligarch in his own right, after a stint on the board of Sibur, a major Russian refinery and chemicals company which he owns 3.9% of today (down from 21.4% when he sold shares last year) in which Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov, is a senior executive.

Back when Dmitriev owned that huge block of Sibur shares, the RDIF – which he has run since its inception in 2011 – approved a $1.75 billion dollar loan to the company. (Yes, that is a very apparently conflicted and corrupt use of government funds to benefit Putin’s insider family and friends).

One of the Times‘ sources must be pretty close to the Russian banker because he or she has a granular view of his daily routine.

Mr Dmitriev regularly attends Ms Tikhonova’s performances in acrobatic rock and roll dancing alongside Mr Shamalov, according to the parent of another contestant.

Why would Erik Prince, the outed CIA agent, and brother of Trump’s most despised cabinet member, Betsy DeVos, best known as the infamous founder of the murderous mercenary firm Blackwater, want to meet with a Russian banker halfway around the world?

Erik Prince told the House Intel Committee that he only had a routine meeting at a hotel bar with RDIF CEO Kirill Dmitriev by accident late last November.

Presumably, only one of the two men can be telling the truth, which sets up a potential legal showdown for the former Blackwater CEO with prosecutors, and with Congress, for the validity of his answers.

In the end, the American people deserve to know what then-President-elect Trump was doing, sending a spy on a 36-hour round trip by air just to contact one of Putin’s intimates in person before being sworn in as Commander-in-Chief.

Read the rest of the FT story here:

Remember Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian fund manager whom Robert Mueller suspects of building secret back channels to the Trump administration? Turns out he's a very close member of the Kremlin family – by way of marriage to Putin's daughter's best friend https://t.co/wwT80qczOH